It’s this time of the year again: on Saturday & Sunday October 8 + 9, Silicon Valley CodeCamp is taking place at Foothill College in Los Altos Hill. There are currently over 200 sessions listed, and 2000 people signed up already. I am expecting lots of fun - again.

Thanks to all of you who attended my sessions on Mocking and on TDD at Silicon Valley Code Camp 2010; I had a great time presenting, in large part because you were awesome and asked great questions!

I uploaded the slides and code for the session on Mocks here. There wasn’t much “written” material for the TDD session, so I didn’t upload it. If someone wants it, let me know in the comments and I’ll add it, too.

Feel free to let me know if there are things I could have done better in the comments below, and don’t forget to fill in your evaluations on the Code Camp website. It’s very helpful for speakers, and… you can win an iPad, courtesy of Dice.com!

On a side note, hats off to Peter Kellner and the whole crew of volunteers. Silicon Valley Code Camp gets bigger every year, and yet, the organization was flawless, and the whole event very fun. Congratulations!

I am very honored to announce that I have become a Microsoft MVP for VSTO, Visual Studio Tools for Office. I learnt the news last week, and I am still super excited. I also feel somewhat intimidated, with a new sense of responsibility towards the community. Thank you Microsoft, and thank you to the Community - I’ll try my best to keep it up, to do my part to keep the .NET community at large a lively one, and to share my experience with VSTO and the fun of .NET + Office with you guys!

In other news, I apologize for the blog slowdown lately. In addition to being super-busy with a project (VSTO), I have had some problems with blog hosting, which have prevented me from writing new material. Things seem to be back on track now, I am sorry if you experienced some 404 inconvenience!

The most awesome free developer event on the west coast is back again, and it looks like it will be even more awesome this year. The 5th edition of Silicon Valley Code Camp is taking place Saturday and Sunday Oct 9th and 10th, 2010, at Foothill College, in Los Altos Hill. There are 194 sessions, already over 1,600 registrations, with topics for all tastes - .NET, Java, Cloud Computing, Python, Javascript, mobile development, and more.

I have grown a bit frustrated by the difficulty to gather information about local .Net development community events. Of all people, I am one of the best-positioned to hear about these events, because of my involvement with the San Francisco .Net user group, and yet, I routinely discover that I missed an event, because there is no clear place to go to get that information and I never heard about it.

So here we go – ladies and gentlemen, introducing NorCalWeekly.Net, your weekly serving of .Net events in north California! My goal will be to provide in one place, on a weekly basis, announcements for all upcoming .Net events in the area – so if you know of anything relevant taking place, please let me know! The design and features are somewhat minimalist for the moment, I’ll improve it over time.